Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Steve Barclay Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). I should like to associate myself with his concluding remarks about guide dogs, and to commend the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association for the spirited campaign it has led on the subject.

It is a great pleasure to speak on a subject of obvious concern to everybody in the country. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, who spoke earlier, I have been in the House since 1997, and I can genuinely say that antisocial behaviour has been at the centre of my casework, both in terms of concerns that people have raised, and of the relief and respite that has been brought about. This is a continuing process; no Government have a monopoly on virtue or effectiveness. However, I want to emphasise that the Labour Government made significant strides in combating antisocial behaviour, and in putting victims at the heart of the justice system; I recall the surprise at that in more conservative legal circles in the early days of that Administration. Mercifully, we have moved on since then.

The controls put in place for statutory partnerships under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 have been enormously important to us in Blackpool, where partnerships between the police, local authorities and others to tackle crime and disorder have worked extremely successfully. I want to make a point that is specific to my constituents and to the town: like many seaside and coastal towns, and many inland towns with a high degree of transience, in Blackpool issues associated with houses in multiple occupation and the problems faced by a minority of rogue landlords and rogue tenants have been very much to the fore. As the House of Commons research paper makes clear, antisocial behaviour injunctions have been valued by social landlords; they have been used successfully against tenants in attempts to tackle vandalism, violence, noise, harassment, and threatening and un-neighbourly behaviour.

As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary made clear, none of this can be done without resources. That is why it was very important that more than 12,000 extra police, and more than 16,000 police community support officers, were introduced under the Labour Government, including in Lancashire, which has particularly benefited from the beefed-up powers that were provided.

What are the issues that any antisocial behaviour Bill should at least touch on and try to address for my constituents in Blackpool? First, there is the question of disorder, particularly in the centre of the town. As many people know, we have millions of visitors every year. Most of them are a delight, but a small proportion are not. The same is true of residents. Problems such as alcohol, petty crime, drugs and general threatening behaviour have always loomed large. Secondly, the issue of houses in multiple occupation is really important. I praise the work done over a long period by the public protection department of Blackpool council, ably headed by Tim Coglan, all who have worked with him, and the cabinet member with responsibility for housing, Councillor Gillian Campbell.

I should like to quote from a couple of letters that I received recently that underline some of our problems. A hotelier—it should be borne in mind that there are some 600 hotels and guesthouses in my constituency—said:

“I run a hotel with my partner situated…in South Shore. We unfortunately have a HMO adjoining us…and one opposite…Both properties have drug and alcohol problems and are situated with ourselves in the ‘Holiday Zone’.

We persistently suffer ‘users’ calling up at the flats for drugs, the police are constantly parking outside our hotel to visit our neighbours. The flat adjoining our hotel on the first floor have dogs, who are rarely taken out of the flat.”

The good news in this story is that Blackpool council, together with other organisations, is working on this. I quote the letter I received from the council:

“Officers of the Housing Enforcement Team have been tackling issues...one of the problem tenants has already been evicted and the managing agents…are in the process of re-housing the tenants with the dogs.”

Another letter from another part of the town mentions the importance of alley gates, which have been a particularly effective way of dealing with antisocial behaviour in Blackpool.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

On HMOs and antisocial behaviour, including in alleyways, are there not already powers available to councils? The issue is whether councils are using the powers they already have, rather than whether new powers are required under the Bill.

[Mr Marsden]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman and I do not disagree with him on the powers, which are already there. What is important is enforcement by councils, and the resources that are available to them. Sadly, Blackpool council’s ability to do the stuff it would like to on alley gates has been severely hindered over the past couple of years by substantial cuts in funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Police and community support officers are crucial, particularly now, when we have problems not just with houses in multiple occupation, but with houses that are bought at low prices when owner-occupiers move out, and landlords rent them out to problem families. I have many examples of that. I pay tribute to the activities undertaken in our town by the police and the community together. I am thinking of a group, ably chaired by Mr Dave Blacker, who are concerned about their PCSOs. Issues of funding and what might be available from Government have come to the fore.

Other really important issues are vandalism—Stanley park and other parts of the town have been badly affected by it recently—metal theft, the protection of war memorials and dumping. Those are all issues on which PCSOs can make an important contribution. That is why we need to look critically at what the Government are doing in the Bill. The crime prevention injunction—the proposed replacement for an antisocial behaviour order—is significantly weaker. A breach of the new injunction is not a criminal offence and will not result in a criminal record. Other proposed measures against antisocial behaviour also appear weak. The Government’s proposed community trigger has seemed weak in the areas in which it has been trialled, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary made clear earlier. As her colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) said, breach of ASBOs was a criminal offence; breach of injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance is not. Nor does the Bill guarantee a response from the police or the council. It guarantees a review. In my region, the north-west, police in Manchester recorded nearly 26,000 cases of antisocial behaviour in 2012-13, but the trigger was activated a mere four times.

When it comes to tackling antisocial behaviour, the elephant in the room is the way the Government have cut the police budget. Police community support officers, who are so often at the forefront in tackling day-to-day antisocial behaviour, have been hit particularly hard. That has led to Lancashire losing 9% of our front-line officers in the first two years of this Tory-led Government, and 500 police officers.

I shall touch briefly on knife crime, which has been a key issue in Blackpool. The Government have, to be fair, introduced a new crime of “threatening with article with blade” in public or on school premises, but the Prime Minister told MPs in recent months that the Justice Secretary was reviewing the powers available to the courts to deal with knife possession, and the Lord Chancellor has said he is revisiting the whole topic of knife crime. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary rightly said, this is a Christmas tree Bill. It is unfortunate that the outcome of those reviews has not informed the detail of the Bill.

The topic of firearms has been touched on. I entirely associate myself with the comments that have been made about the dangers presented by people with a history of domestic violence. We know that only too well in Blackpool from the Justice for Jane campaign, which concerned the case of a young woman who was tragically murdered by her partner, who had a history of domestic threatening and violence. Such ticking time bombs need monitoring, and the Government should be monitoring some of them far more carefully and providing the legislation that would make that possible.

Lastly, I return to the subject of dangerous dogs. I have not been convinced by what the Home Secretary said. Many other organisations—not just the RSPCA, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, Blue Cross and the Select Committee—feel that the proposals, rather like my 15-year-old Jack Russell-Chihuahua cross, are somewhat toothless. Dangerous dogs are a real problem and they need a special and specific remedy. I know that only too well from my former colleague in the House, Joan Humble, who almost lost the tip of her finger when canvassing in Blackpool in 2012. These Government measures, as has been said, are simply too weak. Instead of these piecemeal proposals, the introduction of dog control notices would be wide ranging and enforceable in the sorts of areas that have been discussed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) spoke very powerfully about emotive and clearly tragic cases. I am sure that all Members of the House join her in paying tribute to the families of those victims. She is right that the dangerous dogs legislation introduced by a previous Government did not achieve the desired outcomes; I think that most of us would accept that.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, therefore, I would like to pay tribute to a piece of legislation introduced by Labour. The role of police community support officers in tackling antisocial behaviour has been much maligned over the years, and my party opposed the measure at the time, yet when I look at the work of Aivaras Krochalev and others PCSOs in my constituency who have done so much work, particularly with parts of the community where English is not the first language, it is clear that many of them have helped in freeing up officer time and delivering value for money on the front line rather than sitting behind desks at headquarters.

That is why I welcome the Home Secretary’s measures in the Bill to strengthen some of the powers available to PCSOs. For example, it is illogical for a PCSO to be able to disperse a group from an area but unable to direct an individual to leave it. The Bill is right to give senior officers discretion to tackle that. It is also illogical for PCSOs to be able to fill out forms in those instances but not to issue them. The streamlining of some of the powers that apply to PCSOs will free up police officer time for doing the things that warrant officers should be doing.

Following that logic, I want to press the Minister to consider extending PCSO powers to take on other responsibilities. For example, a PCSO is able to seize drugs, but not search for them. They can search for alcohol and tobacco, and if they happen to find drugs during the course of those searches they can confiscate them, but if they can smell cannabis they are not allowed search for it; they have to divert the time of a warranted officer instead. The feedback I receive from senior officers is that that is not an effective use of police time.

Minor issues can also be annoying to officers. For example, a PCSO can issue a fixed penalty notice for cycling on a towpath—we do not have many towpaths in my constituency, but I am sure that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) finds that to be a useful option—but they cannot issue one for cycling without lights. There are a number of other similar areas; I cite those two examples simply to illustrate my argument. If we follow the Bill’s logic and its welcome measures on, for example, dispersal, we will see that PCSOs could take on more powers in tackling antisocial behaviour and that that would free up police officer time.

Another issue that the Bill does not tackle is that of potential cross-departmental work to enforce antisocial behaviour measures. Last year, there were an estimated 15,000 foreign vehicles on our roads. Once such vehicles are here for more than six months, they have to undergo an MOT and be insured and registered. It is illogical to assume that every single foreign vehicle on our roads has complied with that requirement, yet last year there was not a single prosecution of an unregistered foreign vehicle. Part of the frustration felt by Cambridgeshire police and others is that there seems to be intransigence on the part of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. It uses automatic registration recognition for stolen vehicles, but not in relation to the licensing of foreign vehicles. That has a knock-on effect in community tension; some people feel that they have to insure and register their car while others do not. Clearly, discussions need to be held between the Home Office and the Department for Transport. I would be grateful if the Minister wrote to me to confirm that he will take on that cross-departmental work. From some of the cases that I see at my constituency surgery, the issue is causing considerable annoyance.

Another area where significant time is being wasted and where cross-departmental work is suboptimal is that of licensing. It may surprise the House to hear that an area such as Wisbech in my constituency has more licensed premises in the centre than a student area such as Cambridge. Indeed, we are using existing powers on the accumulated number of licensed premises in order to try to effect change. It is clear that when the police make representations, significant time is spent on compiling long reports that are then often ignored by local councils. It would be beneficial for further work to be undertaken by the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government in order to look at police representations and whether the time spent on cases involving licensing and antisocial behaviour in communities is used as effectively as possible.

The Bill’s measures will be welcome only if they are enforced. In our rush to legislate, one of the traps that we fall into in this place is that we suspect that just introducing a Bill on antisocial behaviour will effect the change that we seek. It is clear that some of the existing measures to tackle antisocial behaviour are not being enforced. For example, an illegal rave took place in my constituency on new year’s eve. It may surprise the House to learn that the police were at the scene but—understandably, because of the numbers of people present—took the view that it was not safe for them to intervene at that point. However, even though the police were on site when the illegality took place, and even though the business owner took countless photos and the Home Secretary, no less, expressed her horror and shock and desire for enforcement when I spoke to her about the case, I discovered last week, without the police having the courtesy to tell me, that after six months they had simply dropped the investigation.

It is difficult for the community to understand exactly what evidence the police need to tackle the crime given that they were there as it happened. I welcome the Bill’s antisocial behaviour measures, but I would be grateful if the Minister took up that issue up with the chief constable of Cambridgeshire and addressed why, in a case that involved more than £50,000-worth of damage on new year’s eve and that caused concern to other business owners, no enforcement action has been taken.

I am conscious of your diktat on time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so with a minute remaining let me finish on a positive note. Under the wonderful leadership of Inspector Sissons in Wisbech, we have launched Operation Pheasant, which has so far raided 80 houses of multiple occupation and has a number of live inquiries. It demonstrates what can be achieved when effective enforcement action is taken. That would not have happened without the active support of the Home Secretary, which, along with the Bill’s measures, will do much to tackle other cases of antisocial behaviour in the months and years ahead.